UNIT 3 SAMPLING AND STATISTICAL INFERENCE CHAPTER - I SAMPLING DISTRIBUTIONS

SEEMA JAGGI AND PRAJNESHU Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute Library Avenue, New Delhi - 110 012. seema@iasri.res.in; prajnesh@iasri.res.in

1. Introduction
The term population is referred to any collection of individuals or of their attributes or of results of operations which can be numerically specified. Thus, there may be population of weights of individuals, heights of trees, prices of wheat, number of plants in a field, number of students in a university etc. A population with finite number of individuals or members is called a finite population. For instance, the population of ages of twenty boys in a class is an example of finite population. A population with infinite number of members is known as infinite population. The population of pressures at various points in the atmosphere is an example of infinite population. For any statistical investigation with large population size, complete enumeration (or census) of the population is impracticable, for example, estimation of average monthly income of the individuals in the entire country. Further, in some cases, if the population is infinite, then the complete enumeration is impossible. As an illustration, to know the total amount of timber available in the forest, the entire forest can not be cut to know how much timber is available there. To overcome the difficulties of complete enumeration, a part or fraction is selected from the population which is called a sample and the process of such selection is called sampling. For example, only 20 students are selected from a university or 10 plants are selected from a field. For determining the population characteristic, instead of enumerating all the units in the population, the units in the sample only are observed and the parameters of the population are estimated accordingly. Sampling is therefore resorted to when either it is impossible to enumerate all the units in the whole population or when it is too costly to enumerate in terms of time and money or when the uncertainty inherent in sampling is more than compensated by the possibilities of errors in complete enumeration. The theory of sampling is based on the logic of particular (i.e. sample) to general (i.e. population) and hence all results will have to be expressed in terms of probability. To serve a useful purpose, sampling should be unbiased and representative.
The aim of the theory of sampling is to get as much information as possible, ideally the whole of the information about the population from which the sample has been drawn. In particular, given the form of the parent population, one would like to estimate the parameters of the population or specify the limits within which the population parameters are expected to lie with a specified degree of confidence.

Sampling Distributions

The fundamental assumption underlying most of the theory of sampling is random sampling which consists in selecting the individuals from the population in such a way that each individual of the population has the same chance of being selected. Suppose a sample of size n is taken from a finite
population of size N. Then there would be N

=
n

N! , where n! = n(n-1)1, possible samples. n!(N n)!

N

A sampling technique in which each of the samples has an equal chance of being selected is
n

known as simple random sampling. Some of the other commonly used sampling procedures are: Purposive sampling, stratified sampling, systematic sampling and cluster sampling. The type of sampling to be adopted depends on the objective of the study and the variability in the population. It may be pointed out that throughout the term random sampling would always refer to simple random sampling.

1.1 Definitions of Some Important Concepts Parameter: A parameter is a function of population values.

Example 1.1: Suppose X1, X2,, XN are N population values. Then population mean () is a parameter defined as 1N

N i= 1 X i .

Further, population standard deviation () is another parameter defined as = 1 N i= 1

N (Xi )2

Statistic: A statistic is a function of sample values. Example 1.2: Two of the most commonly used statistics based on a sample of size n are sample mean ( X ) and sample standard deviation (s) defined as X=
n

1 n Xi ,

i= 1

s=

1 (X X) 2 i

n - 1 i= 1

Sampling Distributions

In practice, parameter values are not known and their estimates based on the sample values are used. A statistic is since based on sample values, there can be many choices of the samples that can be drawn from the population. The distribution of the statistic computed for all possible values of the sample is called sampling distribution. From the given set of observations, different statistics are constructed to estimate the parameters. The sampling distributions of these statistics will, in general, depend on the form and the parameters of the parent population. The probability of the observed value of the statistics then allows the making of statements about the parameters and hence conclusions can be drawn about the population. The sampling distributions are thus fundamental to the entire subject of inference and are described below. 2. Sampling Distribution of Sample Mean When different random samples are drawn and sample mean or sample standard deviation is computed, in general, computed statistics will not be same for all samples. Consider an example, where the population has four units 1, 2, 3, 4 possessing the values 2, 3, 4, 6 for the study variable. Thus, the population mean is (2+3+4+6)/4 = 3.75. Number of possible samples of size 2 without replacement is 6. The possible samples with sample mean are given below: Possible samples of size 2 without replacement S.No. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Possible Samples (1, 2) (1, 3) (1, 4) (2, 3) (2, 4) (3, 4) Sample Mean 2.5 3.0 4.0 3.5 4.5 5.0

It is seen that the sample means are not the same from sample to sample. However, the average of sample means, i.e. (2.5 + 3.0 + 4.0 + 3.5 + 4.5 + 5.0)/6 is 3.75 which is same as population mean. The variance of sample means is 0.73.
In general, if the population size is N and sample of size n is to be drawn, then possible number of . samples without replacement are N! n!(N n)! Result 2.1: If the population is finite of size N, with mean and standard deviation , distribution of sample mean (X ) obtained from the random sample (without replacement) of size n will have mean

and standard deviation N n . N n 1

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